Covid 19 coronavirus: student who tested positive in undisclosed contact, says Hipkins

By RNZ

Health Minister Chris Hipkins says it has become clear that some close contacts from the church subgroup Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship were not previously disclosed, including a student who recently tested positive.

Police are now helping community health authorities, he said.

A student at St Dominic’s Catholic College in Auckland tested positive for Covid-19 and has been linked to the subgroup.

The student was last at school on Friday, but left early after starting to feel unwell.

Hipkins said that in this case it appears it was a close contact from the subgroup that had not previously been disclosed.

Authorities are now investigating whether that was on purpose.

“That’s one of the things the investigation is looking at right now and it will include seeing if there was a deliberate decision not to disclose, or if it was just an oversight,” Hipkins said.

He said it has been a challenge working with this subgroup as some members do not understand the seriousness of the situation.

“It has been a challenging group to work with.

“Certainly there are some within the group who may not accept or have not previously accepted the science involved here and that has made this a bit more challenging than some of the others that we have dealt with.”

They are now being educated on the seriousness of the situation, he said.

“It certainly would seem like they were skeptical at first,” Hipkins said. “I think a lot has been done with them since then.”

When asked what the outcome was if it was discovered that someone had deliberately failed to tell authorities that they were a close contact, he said: “One of the things I told health yesterday is that I want the police to be involved in helping here too and what happened yesterday afternoon. “

When asked what role they would take, he said: “I think the police are involved … they have good connections with the community. It is certainly a symbolic sign that this is a very serious situation. The police are lending their support.” to help, using their community relationships to make sure we are really getting the kind of cooperation we really need. “

When told that there were legal ramifications, he said, “No, this is more in a community relations sense.”

However, Hipkins said parents should feel safe sending their children to school.

“Clearly there have been one or two cases where the contact tracing system has not identified them, but they were detected through testing.

“So the backing of the extensive evidence is to collect the additional cases so that parents can be confident that outside of the schools that have been identified there are no additional cases that are not disclosed.”

St Dominic’s Catholic College will close for at least three days and the Ministry of Education is working to identify close contacts in the case.

– RNZ